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Blender is simply bad UI-Design. It has nothing to do with a learning curve. I ve used alot of open source software, and the UI is usually the equivalent to en

Blender is simply bad UI-Design. It has nothing to do with a learning curve. I ve used alot of open source software, and the UI is usually the equivalent to english-aristocratic mansion, where every late addition is glued to the main house like a little bay window. And the first strange keyboard and control preferences (can we put a terminal in for that), will be forced down your throat. And i can handle this. Usually you find the configs and tailor them to something more adhering to common user-expectations. But then all the tutorials become useless for you. And that is where its over. I would really have loved this project to succeed. And in parts it has. There are awesome plugins for nearly everything. (Evolutionary Algos for Animation creation for example) But its completely disregard for UX-Standards have prevented it from making a industry-impact. A 3 year subscription to the max, is more expensive then it was 1990. http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-182943.html http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-182943.html That's how a self-inflicted defeat looks like.

moron4hire 10y ago
Blender is not actually that bad. 3D modeling is just a hard job. You have to make a set of 2D tools that are fundamentally conflicted with the 3D work you're trying to do. You cannot realistically use Maya or 3DS Max in a professional setting without also learning a raft of keyboard shortcuts and non-standard UI. I keep hearing this "Blender doesn't adhere to common UX standards", but nobody ever says which particular parts are the non-standard UI elements. They don't use a standard UI toolkit, but that's not the same thing as not using standard UI design. I look at it right now and I see: tabbed documents, buttons, sliders, textboxes, accordion panels, all in relatively easily recognizable formats. You have to right-click instead of left-click to select things. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that initial, small, tiny road bump encourages people to look up tutorials instead of trying to forge ahead without any training. But there are some things that are just not going to be easy. There is a reason why materials are separate than textures. The modifiers interface has actually been drastically cleaned up and things like particle emitters greatly simplified within even the last year. Where it has "non-standard UI elements", it's because there is no standard UI element to do the job. The shader node editor is quite intuitive, if you ask me. So again, if you're going to complain about a specific thing, please cite specifics. So save your money and put the effort into Blender. 3DS Max is not $5000 better than Blender.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  Right now you can sit down in front of Maya, Houdini, or Modo and, knowing one of those packages, figure out how to navigate the UI in maybe 10 minutes. A few months ago, firing up Blender, I had to go watch some YouTube videos to figure out how the hell the UI worked.
  - zokier 10y ago
    Being different does not make it worse. You could argue that emacs ui is bad because vim user would struggle in it, or vice versa, but I think most people would agree that wouldn't make a lot of sense
    - gcp 10y ago
      If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse. For all the bad things you can say about it, IIRC the windows in Emacs (when running on X) behave like normal windows.
      - wtetzner 10y ago
        > If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse. I disagree. You're basically saying the current UIs are the pinnacle of UI design, just because they're popular. Especially for software that will be used in anger day-in and day-out, it's much more important to have an efficient UI than one with discoverability or a shallow learning curve.
        Pica_soO 10y ago
        No, they are not. He is arguing that you throw away years of user-experience for no apparent reason. Those people don't have the luxury to retrain for a same-function-framework just because some dev can dance. They are part of a pipeline, they have work to do, and insulting them as unwilling-to-learn, is simply missing the point.
vvanders 10y ago
Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes. 3D authoring software/tools is a funny business. Fundamentally developers aren't the primary users so they can't fully evaluate the effectiveness of their software. However unlike other domains like a web browser there aren't enough users for developers to get proper feedback about things like UI and workflow. For the same reason that every year is supposedly the "year of linux on the desktop" you'll never see Blender/Gimp/etc unseat Max/Maya/Photoshop.
- gcp 10y ago
  Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes. Every post in this thread that is explaining why Blenders' UI is bad is being downvoted.
  - macawfish 10y ago
    That's because there are some people who strongly disagree that it's simply "bad". If it was as simple as "Blender's UI is bad", then there wouldn't be so many people who absolutely love it ;)
    - Pica_soO 10y ago
      Those strongly disagreeing people could post some strong arguments for where the UI is better then Max/Maya.
vmarshall23 10y ago
I used to believe that Blender was bad UI design, but now I think it's quite good, albeit different approach. Take this with a huge grain of salt, as 3d art is rarely my primary job function, but after I deliberately sat myself down and tried to approach Blender in the way it's intended, instead of getting frustrated by it not working the way wanted it to, I finally grokked it. Now I'm frustrated by other programs not working the way blender does. I can't really say if that make it better or worse UI/UX, because I don't really get what most people think of as good UI/UX as being all that great. (e.g. why is the iOS back button on the top left of my screen, when every other directional notion is at the bottom?!?!) Anyway, I like to think of Blender as a series of UI workflows wrapping some python scripts, workflows that don't assume that all things should be done via the MacBook Wheel :-)

moron4hire 10y ago

Blender is not actually that bad. 3D modeling is just a hard job. You have to make a set of 2D tools that are fundamentally conflicted with the 3D work you're trying to do. You cannot realistically use Maya or 3DS Max in a professional setting without also learning a raft of keyboard shortcuts and non-standard UI. I keep hearing this "Blender doesn't adhere to common UX standards", but nobody ever says which particular parts are the non-standard UI elements. They don't use a standard UI toolkit, but that's not the same thing as not using standard UI design. I look at it right now and I see: tabbed documents, buttons, sliders, textboxes, accordion panels, all in relatively easily recognizable formats. You have to right-click instead of left-click to select things. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that initial, small, tiny road bump encourages people to look up tutorials instead of trying to forge ahead without any training. But there are some things that are just not going to be easy. There is a reason why materials are separate than textures. The modifiers interface has actually been drastically cleaned up and things like particle emitters greatly simplified within even the last year. Where it has "non-standard UI elements", it's because there is no standard UI element to do the job. The shader node editor is quite intuitive, if you ask me. So again, if you're going to complain about a specific thing, please cite specifics. So save your money and put the effort into Blender. 3DS Max is not $5000 better than Blender.

santaclaus 10y ago
Right now you can sit down in front of Maya, Houdini, or Modo and, knowing one of those packages, figure out how to navigate the UI in maybe 10 minutes. A few months ago, firing up Blender, I had to go watch some YouTube videos to figure out how the hell the UI worked.
- zokier 10y ago
  Being different does not make it worse. You could argue that emacs ui is bad because vim user would struggle in it, or vice versa, but I think most people would agree that wouldn't make a lot of sense
  - gcp 10y ago
    If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse. For all the bad things you can say about it, IIRC the windows in Emacs (when running on X) behave like normal windows.
    - wtetzner 10y ago
      > If there are standard UI interactions that are used by all programs but yours, then yes, being different is worse. I disagree. You're basically saying the current UIs are the pinnacle of UI design, just because they're popular. Especially for software that will be used in anger day-in and day-out, it's much more important to have an efficient UI than one with discoverability or a shallow learning curve.
      - Pica_soO 10y ago
        No, they are not. He is arguing that you throw away years of user-experience for no apparent reason. Those people don't have the luxury to retrain for a same-function-framework just because some dev can dance. They are part of a pipeline, they have work to do, and insulting them as unwilling-to-learn, is simply missing the point.

vvanders 10y ago

Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes. 3D authoring software/tools is a funny business. Fundamentally developers aren't the primary users so they can't fully evaluate the effectiveness of their software. However unlike other domains like a web browser there aren't enough users for developers to get proper feedback about things like UI and workflow. For the same reason that every year is supposedly the "year of linux on the desktop" you'll never see Blender/Gimp/etc unseat Max/Maya/Photoshop.

gcp 10y ago
Not sure why you're getting so many downvotes. Every post in this thread that is explaining why Blenders' UI is bad is being downvoted.
- macawfish 10y ago
  That's because there are some people who strongly disagree that it's simply "bad". If it was as simple as "Blender's UI is bad", then there wouldn't be so many people who absolutely love it ;)
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    Those strongly disagreeing people could post some strong arguments for where the UI is better then Max/Maya.

vmarshall23 10y ago

I used to believe that Blender was bad UI design, but now I think it's quite good, albeit different approach. Take this with a huge grain of salt, as 3d art is rarely my primary job function, but after I deliberately sat myself down and tried to approach Blender in the way it's intended, instead of getting frustrated by it not working the way wanted it to, I finally grokked it. Now I'm frustrated by other programs not working the way blender does. I can't really say if that make it better or worse UI/UX, because I don't really get what most people think of as good UI/UX as being all that great. (e.g. why is the iOS back button on the top left of my screen, when every other directional notion is at the bottom?!?!) Anyway, I like to think of Blender as a series of UI workflows wrapping some python scripts, workflows that don't assume that all things should be done via the MacBook Wheel :-)